The Pivot Pictured Above Acts as if We’ve Swapped Out Fields on Rows – in Response to a Slicer Click! First off…my first post! Being one of the newest (and youngest) members of the PowerPivotPro family has been very exciting…

Cube Formulas: Ultimate flexibility for your reports but lots of drama to update…

A while back, I was tasked with finding a way to automate upkeep of a scorecard built primarily with thousands of cube formulas (Yes, thousands!). This particular scorecard was still under development, and maintaining and making changes to it had become a full-time job! All of the individual cube formulas needed to be updated several times a week, and this was expected to go on for months as executives made up their minds on the final product.

Fortunately, I found two tricks that allowed me to:

a.) Change slicer references in all cube formulas with a single click

b.) Modify entire tables across multiple sheets in seconds

These two tricks freed up time that I used to drive further improvements and start performing real analysis, rather than just maintaining a report.

Cube Formulas: Flexible and Powerful

Cube formulas allow you to add PowerPivot/SSAS Tabular calculations to any cell in virtually any orientation that you can think of. They’re a big part of what makes Excel simply the world’s best data tool, period.(Imagine if you could use them in Power BI Designer!)

The flexibility of cube formulas is powerful, but it does carry a price. Cube formulas are worksheet functions, so they bring their ‘worksheet function drama’ with them (lack of portability, unique formulas, individual updates, etc).

Here are two tricks to keep your formulas easy to maintain and update!

Cube Formula Trick 1: Consolidate Your Slicer References!

The first thing I noticed when opening my scorecard was the length of the cube formulas! I clicked on a cell containing a CUBEVALUE() formula and was greeted by multiple rows of slicer names in the function bar. The scorecard had a total of 10 slicers, and each needed to be referenced in the formulas. What’s more, not all of the slicer names in the scorecard were to be included in the calculations and yet more slicers were set to be added in the future!

by Matt Allington Recently I have been building some interactive charts for one of my clients using techniques that I have learnt from powerpivotpro.com, from searching the Web, as well as some of my own ideas. While some of the…

[OSCAR]: “Is it possible to have a tooltip in powerpivot which shows additional information based on the cells selected (or mouse roll over). the info to be displayed comes in from a table created with cube fuctions on the same data source. So the coordinates of the highlighted cells would be inputs for the cube formula and result displayed in a tool tip dynamically.”

My first thought was “no, not possible.” Then ten seconds later, a guerilla-style hack came to mind. And then, my reply:

[ROB]: “Oscar you are a very, VERY bad man. I am now obsessed with this problem. There goes my Sunday.”

The Trick: Hyperlinks to Nowhere!

The One and Only “Sam Rad”

At the Microsoft MVP Summit last week in Seattle/Redmond, I got to see and hear a lot of cool things. But none of that compares to seeing old friends and colleagues – some of the most extraordinary people I have ever known (and ever WILL know).

People like Sam Radakovitz for instance, aka “SamRad.” A veteran Excel team member who briefly left to do other things but is now back on Excel. This is Very Good News.

(Actually this is a theme – a lot of former Excel program managers in particular have “come home” from other places and have rejoined the team. I expect this next release of Excel to be something special).

In addition to being a numbers/technical guy, Sam is very visually gifted. He takes bland stuff and makes it sing.

We all could learn a thing or two (or a hundred) from Sam. Even in spreadsheets, presentation quality has tremendous impact.

BTW, if you want to read that post Ken was tweeting about (the one written by Bob Phillips, another Excel MVP), here it is: Click to Read Bob Phillips, Excel MVP, Writing About Cube Formulas in PowerPivot

Intro From Rob: Greetings from Vegas!

Well ok, Vegas isn’t tons of fun when you don’t leave your hotel room very much, but hey, I have a great view of castles and downtown Manhattan. I’m a little worried that this photo may open a wormhole into some alternate universe however:

Hey Wait a Second – How Is this Picture ALREADY inthe Blog Post Being Written in The Same Picture??? My Head Hurts.

Anyway, today David Hager has graciously stepped to the plate with a guest post. He’s seen me goofing around with conditional formatting a lot and he’s got some advanced techniques to add to the mix. Today’s post sets the stage for that.

It all revolves around the capability of CF (Conditional Formatting) to use formulas as the “decider” of whether or not to format a cell:

The technique of CF in Excel is especially powerful where formulas are used to define the desired TRUE/FALSE condition to be applied. It occurred to me that in this era of data visualization and controls (such as slicers) for altering the data view, there was no user method for changing the underlying logic of applied conditional formats. As an example, say that on a worksheet that cell D7 has a CF formula of =D7>8. There is no way to change the CF to =L7>8 unless the CF control on the Ribbon is opened and the formula is manually changed. Further, a CF formula with both conditions ( =AND(D7>8,L7>8) ) may be what is desired, and the user may not know how to do this. Thus, I decided to create a method that allows for the selection and changing of CF conditions from dropdowns using data validation lists.

There have also been a number of comments on each post that suggested alternate (and often better) ways of doing things. I’ve never been terribly comfortable with that third post in particular, the one dealing with multiple selections.

Funny thing is, I used a new technique (for me) in the Calendar Chart posts, but never went back and called it out explicitly. Today I am going to correct that omission.